


What the papers don't note

by Carmila



Category: Elisabeth - Levay/Kunze, Takarazuka Revue RPF
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-27
Updated: 2014-03-27
Packaged: 2018-01-17 05:15:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1375093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carmila/pseuds/Carmila
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tod has by now seen the death of both his beloved and his enemies, but of all those deaths, the one that got to him most was unexpected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What the papers don't note

The shadows are shifting.  
  
Vienna, Budapest and into eternity in the blink of an eye.  
If  he would blink.

  
Time freezes.  
  
He wanders through the palace and wonders when exactly this has become a palace. He has no sure way of telling, because his darkness is ever changing, molding itself to accompany feelings he does not quiet understand. Lately (whatever lately means for him, as he has no concept of understanding time when applied to himself), it looks like a palace. Not like any palace, like the high house of Habsburg seen through his eyes. Creaking and breaking and on the verge of destruction, about to take  its last breath . The roof looses tiles like an old man his teeth, the glass in the windows is sprung, and the doors are more hanging in the angels than still standing.  
The beauty of the decay is everywhere, and he wonders if that might be what drew him to this cursed family.  
The sense of an end.  
The tiniest hint of a smile clings to the corners of his mouth before it flees into the shadows again, a safer place than his sharp face.  
He would laugh, wouldn’t he? Laugh and make a jab about how the Lord of the Dead is still only in love with himself, to be so obsessed with a family that symbolizes nothing but the end. A woman who’s heralding the end of an era. End. Nothing but himself. She is his herold, in a way she didn’t understand until  the end.

 

The room he enters now, while time still doesn’t dare to pass, also has a counterpart in their Schloß Schönbrunn – he calls it his Habsburg cabinet, when one of his rare outbursts of humour strikes him. He knows that in Vienna, in the world of the living, that room is called the Chinese Cabinet, furnished with black lacquer carvings from China. That particular Empress had not only been obsessed with her children, but also with a land in the Far East she had never seen herself. Impressive woman, he remembers her well.  
  
But the shadows would not be doing their job if they had simply provided him with a carbon copy of a room he can enter at leisure anyway, doors do as little to keep him out as little as iron bars and stones.  
  
No, this room is different. It’s the final proof of his obsession, the part of what he would call his heart that he does not understand himself, and that yet drives him forward.  
  
There is no single carving in here, and what is white in the world of the living is black here.  In that black, in decaying gold frames, is he. Or, to be more accurate, facets of him.  No person sees him as quiet the same, as death means a different thing for all of them.  It’s not only grief and bitter longings he brings, and he is always surprised by the way people perceive him to be. It’s always new, always changing, and he doesn’t quiet know what prompts them to view him as such.  
  
The first painting is the oldest, the paint long dry and already cracking in certain places, as if it wanted to remind him how long it has been since he wore that face. Tod reaches out, tracing the cheek that looks so different from the face he sees when he is looking into a mirror. The hair is longer too, curly, and with a tinge of blue that he thinks  to mean melancholy, longing.  
This  is how he came to Sophie, with not as much hate as he thought he would feel, and this is how she choose to view him. The embodiment of all that had disappeared from her life. A young, beautiful man, with so much emotion glowing inside him that it came to the surface in seething flames, present in each line of his face. Unable to hide any feeling, like she had done all her life. She had tamed each feeling in order to protect her son, until her heart had dried up like a flower without any water.  
He remembered that this particular facet, her very own, private death, had possessed a voice like an angel. Strange what people longed for.  
  
He leaves the painting behind for now, but takes the walking stick with the ivory handle and the silver intarsies that is leaning on the wall next to it. He doesn’t outright think it sentimental to keep mementos of those he takes, but this family stole so much of his time that he thinks it only justified.  
  
  
The next painting is viewed with more fondness, and still makes him wonder just how that happened. Archduke Max of Bavaria. The one his family always called strange, and yet, sometimes Tod is sure that he was not only the happiest one of them, but also the one with the most refined sense of aesthetics.  
When he looks at this portrait, he doesn’t see a man but a woman, silver and black cascading down on her shoulders, unrestrained.  She had been the kind of woman Max would have loved in life, beautiful, free-spirited with a feline grace, and a permanent laugh dancing in her eyes.  And soft at heart, so soft that she had granted him the final whish of speaking to his daughter before she had whisked him  away.  
Whenever he remembers that she kissed him, a smile reaches his eyes.  
  


This time he takes the top hat that is resting on the small table next to the painting, and puts it on his own head. When he heads out, he intends to be well dressed, and black always goes with black, no matter what face he will take this time.  
  
The man who had attended the funeral of Max had been the reason for the next portrait.

Rudolf, poor Rudolf.Twisted until the end, not even sure what he wanted in the only moment that truly belonged to no one but him, his death.  
When he looks at this portray he sees dark eyes, a predatory grin and long fingers attempting to capture, to take hold. As with all of his portraits, he is not sure where several details in this one come from, nor what they mean. The black marking on his left hand, for example, the hint of green in his straight hair, or the fact that his canines are showing even in a smile.  
Possessiveness, that’s what he associates with Rudolf’s death, a need to capture and claim the only son of the empress, and a raging jealousy. So jealous that he had not only taken Rudolf but also the girl who had been with him that night, for Rudolf had seen his Tod as loving him so much that he would not suffer any competition.  
Strangely, this portrait has a facial resemblance to the one for Sophie. The chin is longer, but there are similarities, as if they might have been siblings.  
  
He picks up the small pocket watch he kept after Rudolf had taken his last breath in his arms, and puts it into the breast pocket of his black jacket. Very much the crown prince, to carry around an eternal reminder of the fact that everything had an end.

 

When he makes his way to the last picture in this row, he sighs. Her, of course. Elisabeth, another eternal mystery to him.  
He does not understand.  
This portrait looks so horribly, horribly young that he can’t help but call it boyish. A boy with all the sadness in the world in his eyes, and yet trying to hard to keep it together that he does not dare to show emotion, for that would a crack in his armor. He has looked at this portrait, long and hard, and yet the only hint of passion in this cold, distant beauty are the red streaks in the silver hair, the only hint of playfulness the small braids. Sometimes, when he has looked at it for to long in the desire to finally understand,  he almost sees Sisi in this face. Then she shakes his head and tells himself that it’s nonsense, that she can’t have been this much in love with herself instead of in love with him. But a part of him keeps pointing out how much closing off from the world to protect oneself really is what the empress did, how eternal youth was her ideal, how she also had become closed off and cold like marble. That is always the point when he turns away, because those are thoughts he does not wish to entertain.  
  
He does so now too, ignoring the fan next to the portrait, which she used to hide herself, and turns to the last one in the gallery, the only one that has manifested there in advance.  
  
Because he will not give a damn about what Franz-Joseph will want in his final moment, oh no. Not for the man who stole the woman that should have been his, no. When he comes for him it will be with all the rage that is still burning inside him.  
He will stand tall and strong, and when he speaks, even the earth will shatter. He can see the rage in every line of this face, the strength he longs to have then, the promise of revenge.  
No flowing fabrics, no warm colors. Leather, from head to toe, and even the hair already looks slightly disheveled, the lavender curls in disarray. He is not going to bother with niceties then.  
  
Successfully distracted from the dark thoughts of Elisabeth only being in love with herself, Tod finally turns away. He has an appointment he wishes to keep at all costs.  
  
The shadows take form.  
  
The cell is small, dark and wet, and the smell would be maddening if he was affected by such things. It’s a good thing he isn’t.  
  
The man has changed since the last time he saw him, there is gray in his hair, and even the moustace is gone from his face. He’s pale from lack of sunlight, and achingly thin. Prisoners who kill Empresses are not fed well, Tod assumes.  
  
And yet Luigi Lucheni smiles when he sees him.

  
“You surely took your time Boss. Expected you much earlier, eh?”  
  
Puzzling until the last moment, that one. Under Tod’s watchfull eyes, he takes off his belt, humming something that seems to be an Italian folksong. Oh well.  
  
“Your time had not come yet.”  
  
And, no matter what other people think, he does not speed things up. He only showed options, possibilities to meet him earlier if they wanted to. But in the end, he comes for all of them when he is meant to.  
  
“Nice top hat, by the way… haven’t seen you this dressed up in ages. Not since you intended to blast that wedding, eh?”

“I expected you would appreciate it.”

“Sure do – pass me that bench. Wouldn’t touch it if I were you though. Stuff sticks to your hands for an eternity.”  
  
While he pushes the bench over to him with the walking stick, Tod watches as laughter shakes Lucheni  at what he himself perceives to be a great joke. Eternity indeed, he’s probably getting a kick out of imagining the Lord of Hades with whatever filth stuck to his hand for the end of all days. As if he wasn’t wearing gloves anyway.  
  
“So.” Lucheni continues to speak, now finally looking at him again. “You here. Means it will work this time?”

 

“Yes.” Tod pulls the watch from his breast pocket, the watch that has started to tick again now that it has left the shadows. “It will be all over in ten minutes.”  
  
“Oh, good.” Lucheni grins, his remaining teeth almost look white in the darkness. “Say, what’s it like? The whole dying business and all that stuff.”  
  
For a moment he does not know how to answer. The truth is, he doesn’t know, he has never died. And truth is in his nature, for he is the final truth. But then Lucheni climbs on the bench and takes a hold of the belt, and when Tod gets up and pulls off his top hat to hold it infront of his chest as the final sign of respect, he smiles. Just once, right?  
“It will be one hell of a ride.”

 

 

The shadows shift .  
  
Once more, Tod is puzzled at himself, and when he hurries to the Chinese Cabinet because he needs to know, needs to find out just what Lucheni  saw that prompted him to have this apparent calm, what made him grin when when he knew he was dying.

  
The portrait takes him aback, more than any of the others.  
  
He simply sees – himself.  
A small man with white hair, almost frail, but with a presence that renders size irrelevant. He is sitting on a dirty pallet in a prison cell, his hands resting on the handle of his walking stick, and the top hat slightly tilted on his head.  
  
No one ever dies alone, for he is always there. But even if he is there, people do not see him. People see what they wish for.  
The human papers will note this death well, maybe just somewhere  far off, but they will. They will note that Luigi Lucheni hanged himself on the 19th of October 1910 in his cell, using a belt.  
  
What they will not note is that Tod, for the first time, feels as if he understands what humans mean when they say that only a true friend sees your real self.

 

The shadows are not sure, but they think they hear Tod snicker when he walks away, murmuring something about how he would not even wear a fake moustache if the world was finally about to end.  
  
Then he is gone, and the shadows fall over the one true friend Tod ever had – and the memento he left behind next to his portrait

 


End file.
